In a Youtube video demonstrating VR on the lab’s site, Hamish sits in a virtual casino alongside a taller looking man with dark shaggy hair. On his back is a t-shirt for with the word ‘Voat’ across it. Voat is a right wing clone of the popular link-sharing website Reddit, started in 2015 by disgruntled members of the social news aggregator, when the then CEO, Ellen Pao, banned five of the site’s most hateful communities. The explosive backlash online which ensued served as a kind of alt-right prelude, a first emanating pulse of a right wing dudeocalypse whose magnum opus was thrust into the United States presidency last November.

Many men migrated to the virtual to escape a world that, due to progressive social politics, they felt alienated from. But with last November’s election, many of those same men realised they might not have to anymore. In this sense, the guy with the ‘Voat’ shirt is emblematic of many in the tech world. Just last September, Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey had his sophoclean journey in the industry come to a close when a journalist for The Daily Beast discovered that he was using his newly found riches to fund Donald Trump’s meme machine. Similarly, Hamish tells me the ‘Voat’ guy had to part ways with the group when his politics became too obnoxious and unbearable for the office. “I’m not completely sure, but I do know that he did have some very strange political ideas. He was all ‘Trump Trump Trump’” he says.